Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

by Stephen O'Connor

  3. After Thomas Jefferson’s death, Jeff Randolph attempted to hold the lottery after all, but people were far less interested in helping the Jefferson family than in helping Thomas Jefferson himself, and so the effort failed, leaving the family only one alternative.

  4. On November 3, 1826, Jeff Randolph placed the following advertisement in local newspapers:

  EXECUTOR’S SALE

  Will be sold on the premises, on the first day of January, 1827, that well known and valuable estate called Poplar Forest, lying in the counties of Bedford and Campbell, the property of Thomas Jefferson, dec. within eight miles of Lynchburg and three of New London; also about 70 likely and valuable negroes, with stock, crops, &c. The terms of the sale will be accommodating and made known previous to the day.

  On the fifteenth of January, at Monticello, in the county of Albemarle; the whole of the residue of the personal property of Thomas Jefferson, dec., consisting of 130 valuable negroes, stock, crop, &c. household and kitchen furniture. The attention of the public is earnestly invited to this property. The negroes are believed to be the most valuable for their number ever offered at one time in the State of Virginia. . . .

  . . . Joey touched my shoulder and said, “Aunt Sally,” his voice an urgent whisper. I turned around and saw a man walking toward the stable with two sets of shackles, one in his hand, the other draped over his shoulder. Two other men walked behind him. One of them had an antique musket slung through the crook of his arm; the other carried a coiled cowskin in his hand and had a pistol in his belt.

  The sun had barely risen, and we were standing in front of the solitary open stable door. The opposite door had been nailed shut and was fortified by having a wagon backed against it. The wagon was also to serve as the auction platform, and Mr. Broomfield, the auctioneer, was standing on it issuing instructions concerning the arrangement of crates into a sort of staircase to make ascent and descent more expeditious. A rough fence, with a gate only wide enough to allow the passage of one person at a time, had been built inside the open stable door. And behind that fence stood all the good people whom I had known since they or I were born. A couple of babies were crying, but most everyone else was silent or murmuring in the lowest of voices. Even the children were silent, clutching at their mothers’ skirts or standing alone, eyes wide in infantile astonishment, hugging themselves against the cold.

  An acrid tang, such as I had never smelled outside of a slaughterhouse, hung densely in the dim air inside the stable. Even before I fully apprehended the nature of that odor, I became wild with the desire to flee—not out of any fear for my person but simply because I knew that the world was about to be revealed to me as a miasma of agony and shame. Yet I could not, for I had promised Joey that I would stand by him—dear Joey, whom I had thought of as my own child during the years after his mother, my sister Mary, was sold to her husband, Colonel Thomas Bell. Joey and I were among the handful whom Mr. Jefferson had chosen to free—as were my own two boys, who were in Charlottesville with Joey’s mother, looking for a house in which they and I might live. Of my immediate family, only Critta and Peter were to be sold, but Miss Maria’s son had solemnly promised that he would buy and free Critta, and Danny Farley (who was Joey’s brother and who had already bought his own freedom) agreed to do the same for Peter. Joey had returned from Charlottesville only an hour earlier, having received similar promises regarding his wife and nine children, and he had come to the stable door to give his family the news, as well as a parcel of oatcakes made by Mary.

  And so I stood my ground, though it might be better to say I swayed upon it, for my mind was aswirl with such a diversity of passions and worries that I had to clutch at Joey’s hard shoulder to keep from falling.

  Mr. Jeff was walking toward the man with the shackles. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said. Not two minutes previously, he had been standing beside Joey and me, telling the crowd inside the stable that although he had gotten bids from Georgia farmers, he would not allow “my people” to go to anyone but “good Virginians.” And now here he was, walking toward these grim and unwashed men—“good Virginians” presumably, whose virtue was exemplified by the shackles, guns and whip they carried.

  “Welcome!” he said. “Welcome!” And in a voice that couldn’t have been more amiable were he speaking to dearest friends, he told them that the “viewing” wouldn’t begin for another hour but that they should feel free to look around the house, the entire contents of which would be put up for sale in the coming days.

  It is happening, I thought as I watched this scene. Nothing can stop it now. And yet, despite these asseverations, I simply could not believe that Mr. Jeff, who had always seemed the quintessence of decency and good cheer, should be a party to this impending monstrosity. As Mr. Jefferson reached the extreme of his old age, he had become far less active in the affairs of his plantation, with the result that his overseers had been exercising more and more control, and many of them had been unable to suppress their intrinsic cruelty. On being installed as steward by his grandfather, Mr. Jeff had dismissed the most abusive overseers and encouraged the remainder to exercise a policy of fairness and restraint. Cruelty was not banished from the plantation. In fact, Mr. Jeff himself had presided over a thrashing, but life definitely became easier for all the slaves. And so when word got around about how deeply Mr. Jefferson was in debt, most people believed that Mr. Jeff would find a way to discharge that debt with minimal pain. I had myself. There was even talk that he had come up with a scheme whereby enough money might be raised through a lottery to enable Mr. Jefferson to free all of his slaves upon his death. But absolutely no one had ever imagined that Monticello would simply cease to exist. So here we all were, staggering in disbelief and terror, and here was our supposed savior in congenial conversation with two men sure to bring misery to any number of us.

  After his first glance, Joey had turned his back on Mr. Jeff and the men and was calling out to his wife, who was not visible in the central part of the stable and must have been huddling in one of the stalls to keep warm. Hearing no reply, he called again and again, “Edy! Edy! Edy!,” his voice growing ever more worried and shrill.

  Joey’s anxiety seemed to awaken the fear in the stable. Children began to cry. A woman called out, “Please, Jesus!”—it was Evelina, who had cared for my Beverly and Harriet when they were babies and who now had three young girls of her own. Her cry of despair was answered by others from around the room: “Help me, Lord!” “Precious Savior!” Slowly people began to emerge from the stalls and get up off of the benches, buckets and heaps of hay where they had been sitting, and crowd toward the fenced door.

  “All right!” said Mr. Byrd, who, with Mr. Henderson, was standing guard outside the door—each of them holding a stout staff about five feet long. Mr. Jeff had stationed other overseers carrying firearms around the back and sides of the stable, so as not to “unduly disturb” the people inside with the sight of their weapons. “All right!” Mr. Byrd said again, putting his staff between Joey and the fence, as if to pry him away. “You best be going, Fossett.”

  “I’ve got to speak to my wife.”

  “You best be going,” said Mr. Byrd. “We ain’t got no time for such carrying-on.”

  “I’ve got to speak to her,” said Joey. “Just let me speak to her!”

  By now a crowd had gathered at the fence, and from the back of it Edy called, “I’m here, Joe! I’m here!”

  Mr. Henderson banged his staff repeatedly against the stable door, waved with his other hand and shouted, “All right, everybody! Just you calm down! There’s no cause for consternation. Just go back to where you was sitting!”

  “Edy!” Joey called out.

  “I asked you nicely,” said Mr. Byrd, now brandishing his staff like a club.

  “Please, Mr. Byrd,” I said. “He only wants to comfort his wife and children.”

  “Let him speak!” called a firm male voice from the
crowd inside the stable.

  Mr. Henderson was now pounding on the door with his staff as if he wanted to break it down. “That’s enough, now!”

  “You see?” Mr. Byrd said. “Look at the trouble you started!” He jabbed Joey in the ribs. “You best get away now, or you gonna find yourself on the other side of that fence.”

  Joey didn’t utter a sound but looked Mr. Byrd straight in the eyes, trembling with rage.

  Mr. Byrd raised his staff high into the air, as if he were going to smash it down on Joey’s head.

  Without thinking, I grabbed the raised arm and cried, “Please! No!”

  Mr. Byrd shoved me aside and shouted, “Out of my way, Miss Sally!” Then he swung the staff down hard on the frozen ground between Joey and me. “I don’t care what Mr. Jefferson said! Or Mrs. Randolph! Or anybody! You cause trouble here, you gonna find yourself inside that fence!”

  Hearing the commotion, a pair of overseers had come around from the right side of the stable—both carrying muskets—and a man with a blunderbuss was standing in front of Mr. Broomfield’s wagon.

  I was so filled with fury at that moment that I wanted to grab Mr. Byrd’s staff right out of his hand. There were one hundred and twenty-six people inside that stable and only some ten armed men outside—including the men with the shackles. If all of those inside rushed that makeshift fence, they could have burst right through it. Certainly some of them would have been shot, but they had the white men so grossly outnumbered they could easily have overpowered them, taken their guns and headed off to freedom in the north. In my rage, nothing seemed simpler to me.

  As I stood glaring at Mr. Byrd, the crowd quieted and Mr. Henderson stopped banging his staff against the wall. A voice called out from behind me, “I’m sorry, everybody.”

  It was Mr. Jeff, walking back from the men with shackles—who had their weapons at the ready and a grim eagerness in their eyes.

  “I know how you feel,” said Mr. Jeff, his voice unsteady with emotion. “I, too, wish that this day had never come. Mr. Jefferson and I did everything we could to prevent it, but we were defeated by the banks and by some very bad luck. And now that this terrible day is upon us, all that we can do is try to get through it in the best way possible. I know that nothing I can say will take away your worries and sorrow. And I am sorry about that. I promise you that I will do everything in my power to make sure you go to the very best masters possible. But the only way I’m going to be able to do that is if this auction proceeds in a calm and orderly fashion. If you show yourselves as the good people I know you are, then good people are going to want”—he fell silent a long moment before he finally swallowed and finished his sentence—“to take you home.” He swallowed again. “I am sorry. I wish there was another way.”

  I was standing just behind Mr. Jeff, and I wanted to jab my fingernails into his pink neck. He had ceased being anyone I knew, let alone my own nephew and a man I had liked and respected. He was evil incarnate, and I wanted to drag him to the ground and stamp on his face.

  I did nothing, of course.

  Inside the stable a couple of women began to weep, but everyone else remained silent and still.

  Over Mr. Jeff’s shoulder, I saw a man named Moak Mobley standing at the back of the crowd. Just from the set of his shoulders and jaw, I knew that every muscle in his strong body was rigid with fury, and the same rigidity was in his eyes, which were looking directly at me. He was well within the shadows, but there was such ferocity in his gaze that his eyes seemed alight with white fire.

  Mr. Mobley had done me a grave disservice many, many years ago, and in all the time since, I had scrupulously avoided being in his presence and had kept my head averted when our paths had happened to cross. But now I looked straight into his eyes and hoped that the intensity of my rage would be a match to his. I wanted him to know that I, too, despised the shameless duplicity of Jeff Randolph and of all his family, whose protestations of sympathy, sorrow and regret were simply their way of hiding their damnable guilt from themselves. I wanted Mr. Mobley to know that with every fiber of my heart I desired nothing more than for all Negro people to rise up as one and rid themselves of white tyranny. But the longer I looked into his eyes, the more I came to feel that he did not see me at all, that his rage was so ferocious it had blinded him and that I was nothing before his eyes but a vapor, a ghost, a last crumbling atom of a world obliterated by hate. . . .

  Just before Thomas Jefferson stepped into the subway car where he spotted Sally Hemings, he was standing on the platform furiously scribbling into his journal. “Our very perceptions are works of art,” he wrote, “but also moral acts. This is because we are the ones who create the ‘facts’ we live by. Nothing we see, or hear, or believe is given to us by God, or is even real in any straightforward way. It is all our construction. All our responsibility. Therefore every perception, even the most fleeting, is a moment of truth, during which our souls are in peril. With every perception we create one particle of the world in which we live. As perception is added to perception, we forge the context in which we act, and therefore our perceptions dictate our acts, our morality, our selves, our souls. It is all our own doing. There is no one else to credit or blame. We wrestle, in every instant of our being, with perdition.” The train was coming into the station as he scribbled the last words—so rapidly he wasn’t sure he’d be able to read them when he opened his journal again. He slipped his pen into the journal’s spiral binding. There was a roar. A wind struck his face. He flung his journal into his backpack. The train had stopped. He stepped into the car and sat down. Then he recognized those high cheekbones, those narrow cloud gray eyes, that stricken expression that was only her face at rest (she was reading) and that long arc along her rib cage to her pelvis, every inch of which he could still feel beneath his fingers. Then the car filled with the screeches of mechanical birds. She put her book under her arm and her fingers in her ears. Darkness.

  Thomas Jefferson is out for a morning walk when he sees Beverly sitting on the nailery porch, his elbow on his knee, his head resting on his hand, the other hand poking at the dust with a stick. He is ten years old and seems entirely unaware of his father’s approach or of anything other than the mark his stick is making in the dusty road.

  Thomas Jefferson walks straight over to him and, planting his cane firmly between his own feet, calls out, “Good day, sir!”

  Beverly lifts his head and, for half an instant, seems not to recognize the man he is looking at. “Good day,” he says softly, his face the picture of melancholy.

  “Is anything the matter?” Thomas Jefferson asks.

  The boy shrugs.

  “What have you been doing?” asks Thomas Jefferson.

  “Nothing.” He has made a line in the red dust, and now he crosses it. “Thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “Nothing.”

  Thomas Jefferson does not know whether to be concerned or to reprimand the boy for his rudeness. In the end he says, “That doesn’t sound very interesting.”

  “I was thinking about a lot of things.” Beverly looks up again and squints his eye against the brilliance of the hazy sky. “Mostly I was thinking about why I can’t fly.”

  Thomas Jefferson makes a bemused grunt and, clutching his cane with both hands, hunches over a bit to be closer to the boy. “Did you reach a conclusion?”

  Beverly seems to think his father has just asked a very stupid question. “I don’t have wings,” he said.

  “Would you like to have wings?”

  “I was thinking about that, too.”

  “And?”

  “Only if I could still have arms. I don’t think I’d like it if I only had wings. How would I eat? I’d have to have a beak, and I don’t want to have a beak.”

  Thomas Jefferson laughs. “There are other ways that people can fly than on wings.”

  The boy’s brow knits wi
th both curiosity and skepticism.

  “Come along with me,” says Thomas Jefferson, “and I will tell you about the time your mother and I saw a man fly.”

  Beverly flings his stick to the side of the road and gets to his feet. As he walks beside his father on the road leading back to the great house, he hears the story of le Comte de Toytot’s ascent in the ballon. Thomas Jefferson has nearly finished the story when it becomes apparent to him that the boy does not believe him.

  “It is true,” Thomas Jefferson says. “The ballon rose over the treetops, and the wind carried it for many miles before the count came down in a field.”

  “Did he die?”

  “No. The air in the ballon cooled very slowly, so he descended to the earth as gently as a feather. Though once he was on the ground, a big wind blew the ballon into a river.”

  “Did he drown?”

  Thomas Jefferson laughs. “No. He was already out of the ballon. Nothing bad happened to him at all.”

  Beverly stops walking. He is looking at the sky, his eyebrows lifted and his brown eyes filled with an unabashed curiosity.

  All at once Thomas Jefferson realizes that what he has been interpreting as skepticism is, in fact, so fierce a desire to believe that it makes Beverly think that what he is hearing is too good to be true, and in this conflict Thomas Jefferson recognizes the two most essential qualities of the philosophical mind: a passion for beautiful ideas coupled with an entirely rational understanding that one’s own passion does not make even the most sublimely beautiful idea true.